MaryEllen Elia Offers Counterattack To Hillsborough School Board Allegations Of Financial Mismanagement

The Tampa Bay Times reported last week that former Hillsborough School Superintendent MaryEllen Elia, now the new NYSED Commissioner in New York State, was accused by both members of the Hillsborough school board and the man who replaced her as superintendent of leaving a financial mess in the school district.

Elia, who couldn't be reached for comment by the Tampa Bay Times for two straight days before the original story ran, wrote an op-ed piece on Saturday to pushback against the allegations.

As is always the case with Elia, her pushback is a mix of aggression and diverted responsibility:

Former Hillsborough County school Superintendent MaryEllen Elia said Friday she takes full responsibility for the district’s depleted reserve funds, but that doesn’t mean she was the only one who knew the money was dwindling.

In an op-ed column appearing in Saturday’s edition of The Tampa Tribune, Elia shot back against accusations that she kept school members in the dark while more than half of the district’s $360 million reserve fund was spent in just two years. She insisted that her replacement, Superintendent Jeff Eakins, and school board members were “fully aware” of the state of the reserves.

“The same Board members who routinely micromanaged and overstepped their roles, showed a peculiar lack of interest and lack of understanding of the larger financial issues,” wrote Elia, who landed a job as commissioner of education for the state of New York after being fired from the Hillsborough district in in January.

“My most vocal critics routinely failed to show up or cancelled meetings with me. Their lack of accountability is astounding.”

Here's what some of the board members said in the initial Tampa Bay Times article about how Elia hid the true picture of the district's finances:

Some board members said the budgets that were made public were difficult to understand and they did not get clear answers when they asked direct questions of Saunders and Elia.

"I tried to dig for information," said Harris, who ran for her board seat in 2014 and cast the tie-breaking vote to fire Elia. "But unless you are an expert, it's impossible to get a real budget and real figures."

Stuart, who often asked questions about spending, said she was stonewalled, and despite all her questions was as surprised as the others to learn about the spending issue.

"We had no idea. We honestly had no idea," she said. "We never got the full picture."

Here's more:

Stuart and Harris, who was elected to the board in September, both said they had trouble getting budget documents from Elia and her staff.

“When I ran for office I tried hard to get a copy of budget, because on the website its hidden, and when I got elected I asked for it and was told by the superintendent at the time there would be workshops on the budget and I would get it later, like it was a sidebar,” Harris said.

“We need to be surrounded by experts who know the details and how to dissect our budget — not just one person but several people.”

We have a she said/she said here between the board and Elia over Elia's disclosure of the district's finances.

Let's say we give Elia the benefit of the doubt here, since she was at odds with the board and claims they were out to get her.

The man who took over for Elia as district superintendent, Jeff Eakins, was deputy superintendent when Elia was running the district.

What does he have to say about the matter?

Looks like he says he didn't know about the dire financial situation either:

The school district’s reserve fund sat at $360 million about five years ago and shrank to about $230 million last school year. Eakins said he was “caught off guard” when he stepped into Elia’s position in June and learned the reserve fund is now at $150 million.

...

Eakins said he and others on the staff were “absolutely involved” in the budget process but didn’t expect reserve funds to be drawn down as they were.

“Not only was that alarming to me, but I felt like based on what I saw, some of that $150 million could be reduced even more because it’s caught up in recurring salary expenses.

Eakins said the district is investigating exactly where the money went, but most seemed to pay for a new teacher salary schedule that went into effect halfway through the 2013-14 school year.

Elia claims the Eakins charge is jive:

Elia wrote that this claim is “disingenuous or shows a lack of understanding of the budget.”

About 400 of the highest-paid teachers are scheduled to retire this year, she wrote, which should relieve the strain on a reserve fund that was largely built by cost-cutting measures she instituted.

“These are the kinds of things you learn, develop and understand when you start at 6 a.m.,” Elia wrote. “Did my spreadsheet get lost in transition?”

Eakins, who hasn't attacked Elia personally over this matter and still says nice things about her, disagreed with her reasoning:

The retiring employees will certainly help, Eakins said, “but when you make a budget for a large organization like this you have to plan on other things, not just money saved from single-level employees.”

Teachers aren’t always hired on a beginner’s salary, and the district has more expenses now than it did even last year, he said. The district is facing a growing student population, new construction, increasing health insurance costs, and the end of a seven-year, $100 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

Elia’s severance package also cost an estimated $1.1 million in salary, benefits and unused vacation and sick leave.

...

Eakins said Elia is highly respected for her work in Hillsborough and New York, and is responsible for “many great things” in the school district.

He and the school board plan regular budget meetings with the finance staff to form a plan.

“All I can do coming in as a leader is address current challenges I have and move the district in positive direction,” Eakins said. “We’re facing a very real challenge — it’s not made up, it’s real — and we’re going to be very transparent, very proactive, and very clear on how we spend money moving forward. You aren’t going to see me pointing any fingers.”

There are two Elia allies on the board who backed her up, saying it was the board's fault for not investigating the financial matters more, not Elia's fault for putting forward budgets that ate away the district's reserves.

There's a lot of smoke in the story, with Elia and her allies claiming Elia's critics are full of crap and Elia's critics claiming she was disingenuous in her presentation of the district budget and financial matters, attempting to hide the details.

One thing we do know from this story - Elia remains a controversial figure in Hillsborough who responds to any question about her performance with aggressive counterattack (but only on her terms - notice she only responded with an op-ed but wouldn't give comment to the paper for the initial story) and as with the deaths of the students under her watch, she refuses to take any responsibility for the matter (though she claims otherwise, she spends a lot of time diverting responsibility for the financial mess by pointing fingers at others for being lazy or incompetent.)

One other thing we can anticipate from this story as well - when Elia is pressured here in New York, she will be quick to go on the counterattack and divert responsibility to others.

She did this with the death of the students under her watch and now she's doing it with the financial mismanagement allegations.

A Bloomberg DOE Scandal Still Haunts The City

Do you remember the Willard Lanham/Project Cougar NYCDOE scandal from back in 2011?

If you don't, you can look up some posts I wrote about it here, here and here.

The basic overview was a DOE tech consultant stole a bunch of money from the DOE with the help of IBM and Verizon, who helped him cover the trail.

The consultant, Willard "Ross" Lanham, stole $1.7 million from the DOE from 2002-2008 on top of the six figure salary the Bloomberg DOE was already paying him as a consultant.

The scandal got the tabloid treatment when it was discovered that Lanham had an estranged wife (who you can see below) still living in his house (which you can see above) he had built in his own little real estate development and running a "Cougar" dating service for herself out of it.

She billed herself as "yummy mommy" on her blog and lived the high life meeting 20-somethings in the Long Island club scene:

Lanham had even named the street where his house was after his wife, Laura.                     

It was a sweet story of crime, betrayal and fiscal ineptitude from Bloomberg and his minions.

News of the story came around the same time we were beginning to understand just how much got stolen in the CityTime scandal.

The $1.7 million Lanham stole with the help of IBM and Verizon was a pittance compared to the $600 million the CityTime crooks stole, but it still pointed to an underlying rot in the way Bloomberg and his government outsourced work, hired consultants and did little-to-no oversight on the projects.

Now we learn via a Scott Stringer report that the city is STILL paying the piper for the Lanham scandal, two years after Lanham went to jail and almost a year after "fiscal genius" Bloomberg flew off to Bermuda:

New York City has been missing out on tens of millions of dollars a year in technology funding for schools from the federal government because of a continuing investigation into the Education Department, the city comptroller said this week.

...

The money comes from a program called E-Rate. It charges an average fee of about 25 cents per month to landline and cellphone bills and then uses that money for services like broadband technology in schools and libraries, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program.

Since 1998, the city has pulled in more than $3 billion in E-Rate financing, the comptroller said, and while New Yorkers have continued to pay into that system, they have been barred from the receiving end since 2011 because of a federal investigation.

The F.C.C. declined to confirm or deny any investigation, but a city official said the inquiry was prompted by a scandal involving Willard Lanham, a former technology consultant for the city. He was accused of stealing money from the Education Department and using it to satisfy his and his wife’s expensive tastes, including for cars like a Corvette and a Porsche and to finance the construction of luxury homes on Long Island.

Mr. Lanham was sentenced to 37 months in prison in 2012 for stealing $1.7 million that was supposed to pay for Internet access at the city’s public schools.

In the letter, Mr. Stringer requested an update on the proceedings and asked when the city would be reinstated to the program. The comptroller said that while the Education Department had retained experts in E-Rate compliance as consultants, and paid them more than $670,000, “apparently those contracts ended without resolution to the city’s E-Rate problem.”

A spokesman for the department said that applications had already been submitted for the current E-Rate funding year, and that the program’s administrators were reviewing that application as well as those from the previous three years.

Last week, the F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler, proposed raising the annual spending cap on the E-Rate program, which has not changed substantially since it began in 1997, to $3.9 billion, in an effort to increase Internet connectivity in schools. The F.C.C. said the increase would cost consumers a few cents more per line each month.

Mr. Stringer said this potential increase in spending could mean the city would miss out on more than $350 million by the 2018 fiscal year. He said he did not know if the city would eventually receive the E-Rate money at the end of the investigation.

I've said this before, I'll say it again today:

Why does Bloomberg still have the reputation for being a fiscal genius and responsible manager of the city?

When you add up the consultant scandals and tech boondoggery during the Bloomberg Years, you see that billions were either stolen or wasted.

And as you can see from the Stringer report, the city STILL continues to pay for Bloomberg's criminal malfeasance.

Let's imagine this was de Blasio screwing all this stuff up for years and years.

Can you imagine the treatment it would receive in the papers?

And yet, we see time and time again these stories of consultant criminality and tech boondoggery during the Bloomberg Years get reported with nary a negative word about our former billionaire mayor.

Reminds me a little of this, without the guillotine part at the end:

NYCDOE, Mayor Bloomberg Threw Away $356 Million In Federal Repayments For Special Education Services Because Of Sloppy Accounting

Juan Gonzalez in the New York Daily News:

City public schools lost $356 million during the past three years in federal Medicaid payments for special education services because city and state officials failed to properly apply for reimbursement, the Daily News has learned.

“Red tape and bureaucracy should not stand in the way of (the city) being reimbursed for the vast array of services provided,” city Controller Scott Stringer said in a report obtained by The News.

As a result, between 2012 and this year, the city Department of Education kept shifting funds originally slated for books, supplies and other general costs to pay for those special education services, Stringer said.

And unless officials reform their practices quickly, the school system will miss out on another $310 million from Medicaid over the next four years — for an astonishing total loss of $666 million.

“That’s just unacceptable,” Stringer said. “There’s no excuse for leaving so much money on the table.”

Think about all the things the state had to do to "win" $700 million in Race to the Top money - change teacher evaluations, sign on to the Common Core (or some other "college and career-readiness standards), change the state tests, create a data tracking system for all the stats.

Now think about the city and state together throwing away $356 million in federal reimbursements for special education services and getting set to throw away another $310 million over the next four years for a total of $666 million overall.

That's almost the entire Race to the Top award for the whole state.

All the city had to do was get its paperwork in order to get the money.

But it couldn't do it.

The next time you hear somebody, especially somebody in the media, talk about what a "fiscal genius" Bloomberg was, remember how much money in special education services reimbursements he threw away through his own ineptitude.

$356 million dollars.

Not a lot of money to the Mayor of Money, I'm sure, but a lot of money that then had to be taken out of the city public schools budget and couldn't be used on other things like books, supplies and general costs.

When you add up all the money Bloomberg wasted through his tech boondoggles like the 911 system redo, the NYCHA computer system redo, the FDNY GPS fiasco, etc., along with the fraud perpetrated against the city under Bloomberg's watch (like the CityTime fraud, the various NYCDOE scandals, etc.), you get a picture of a mayor who had no clue what he was doing but got hailed in the media as a "fiscal genius" because a) he owned half of it and b) most journalists bow down to power, especially when that power might be their boss somebody.

We now have one more example of Bloomberg's incompetence in this special education reimbursement mess.

Previous Bloomberg contractor and tech boondoggle stories can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Previous Bloomberg NYCDOE consultant and tech fraud stories can be seen here, here, here and here.

Now de Blasio better get his act together and get the money or we can add him to the Hall of Shame.

I'll give him this year, since he only came to power in January.

But September 4, 2014 starts a full year of school with de Blasio in power.

What used to be Bloomberg's messes now are de Blasio's.

More Predictions Of Doom If Municipal Unions Are Given Raises

It seems being a municipal union worker with an expired contract who expects to have a raise makes you a bad person.

In fact, the NY Times editorial board says you just might cause the apocalypse with that kind of attitude.

You know, Mayor Bloomberg, the self-described fiscal genius,was the guy who let every municipal union contract expire so that all of them now have to be negotiated at the same time.

Bloomberg did it on purpose - he despises government workers and union workers - and he didn't want to give out any raises or compensation increases.

In addition, he wanted to set up an environment, post-Bloomberg, where the next mayor would have a tougher time handing out raises because all the contracts are up at the same time.

In other words, this "apocalypse" was Bloomberg-created and Bloomberg-approved.

He knew exactly what he was doing when he let all the contracts expire at the same time.

Why is it that the editorial boards, full of very serious men and a token very serious woman or two, cannot acknowledge that this so-called fiscal crisis is not the fault of unionized workers?

Why can they not admit that we aren't looking to cause fiscal apocalypse?

Hell, as a teacher, I just want the 8% raise all the other unions got in the last pattern bargaining, plus  whatever the new pattern is going to be for the current negotiations.

Teachers haven't had raises since May 19, 2008.

By the time we get a new contract negotiated, that will be almost six years without a raise.

They keep saying how they want to attract good people to be teachers, to remain teachers.

Well, one way is to pay them and give them raises more than once a decade.

In the end, the money paid to New York City teachers often goes right back to the city in some way - in taxes, in Metro Cards, in rent, in spending on food, clothes and other items, on our children, etc.

It's not as if most of us are going to take the money and stash it in the Cayman Islands in a tax shelter (the way Mr. Bloomberg does with his some of his money, btw!)

So end some of the no-bid contracts Bloomberg signed with outside consultants located in Australia and elsewhere, end the contracts to Pearson, end the tax breaks to the real estate industry, end the corporate largesse and negotiate a fair contract with municipal workers.

It's the right thing to do.

Bloomberg: I'm A Fiscal Genius!

Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave a speech today in which he publicly patted himself on the back for his genius at stewarding the city through rough economic waters and warned that whoever follows him into City Hall had better follow the Bloomberg plan or New York City will turn into Detroit.

Yeah, it was a real humble speech, full of soul-searching and honest reflection for why New York City has income inequality levels approaching Third World proportions, a gap that has significantly worsened under Bloomberg.

No, actually it wasn't that kind of speech at all.

Bloomberg clearly has a fine conception of himself, his abilities and his track record, but as he was touting his fiscal genius in general terms in today's speech, I couldn't help but think of some of that fiscal genius in individual terms.

There was the $500 million Bloomberg allowed to be stolen as part of the CityTime project - the worst fraud perpetrated in NYC history.

There is the 911 system that doesn't work, sometimes crashes half a dozen times a day and puts New Yorkers at risk - but in the end will cost over $2.3 billion, at least $1 billion overbudget.  Oh, and it's at least 7 years past deadline.

Then there is the $80 million ARIS system that everybody in the NYC school system hates and the $36 million dollar NYCHA computer system that doesn't work and the GPS systems he bought for the FDNY that he spent $7.3 million on ($56,000 per GPS unit) that don't work and often gives directions for trucks to drive into the East River and the $43.2 million he allowed some consultant crooks to steal from the DOE with the help of former Tweedie Judith Hederman.

Wow - just look at all that genius! 

I mean, how could NYC ever have survived the 2008 recession without Mike Bloomberg's fiscal genius?

And that's not even tallying up all the little frauds perpetrated by the outside consultants and vendors here and there - the $1.7 million stolen by Willard Lanham from the DOE or the $2.7 million stolen by Nelson Ruiz from the DOE or the myriad other "little" scandals that Bloomberg turned a blind eye to while he pursued his fiscal genius policies.

It would be nice if somebody in the press would call him on his propaganda, but that would actually take somebody in the press with the guts or desire to do that.

Instead they suck up to him like Bill Keller at the Times and Michael Wolff at The Guardian, no doubt knowing that someday they, too, will have to work for Bloomberg or one of his rich pals when their newspapers get bought up in a vanity purchase by one of the half dozen oligarchs in this country still willing to own print.

And so we have this myth that follows Bloomberg around, spread by Bloomberg and the journalists and p.r. people on his payroll, that Bloomberg has been a masterful fiscal steward of the city when, even a rudimentary closer look at the history, shows that is just not so.